Anselm Kiefer Provocations

Met Breuer
945 Madison Ave
New York

Provocations: Anselm Kiefer at The Met Breuer will feature 34 works on paper and one painting by the German artist, all drawn from The Met collection.

The exhibition will span the artist's nearly 50-year career and will be on view at The Met Breuer through April 8, 2018.

Anselm Kiefer (born 1945) has confronted and wrestled with the past throughout his career. In 1969, toward the end of his studies at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, Kiefer photographed himself in his father's Wehrmacht uniform, posing in front of historic monuments and Romantic seascapes in Europe, with his arm extended in an illegal Nazi salute. Six years later, the artist selected 18 of these images for a photo-essay titled "Occupations," which met with widespread public outcry. Indeed, while Kiefer's artistic provocation ran counter to the intense process of postwar denazification, which included the removal and destruction of offensive signs of Germany's infamous history, it was also an unwelcome threat to a kind of collective amnesia that had overtaken West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s.

https://metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2017/anselm-kiefer